A few days ago Donald Trump called into Michael Savage’s radio show. Savage suggested that if Trump wins, he would like to be appointed head of the National Institutes of Health. Trump responded:

Well, you know you’d get common sense if that were the case, that I can tell you, because I hear so much about the NIH, and it’s terrible.

Who says Trump isn’t doing what he promised to do? But I digress.

At the time, I foolishly thought that Trump was just doing the verbal equivalent of nodding along with an idiot–something politicians must do often. But now that we know that Il Trumpe’s most ‘mainstream’ source of news is Fox News (which stovepipes all sorts of garbage), and that he regularly parrots* far-right websites and talk-show hosts, it’s clear he just might believe that the NIH is “terrible.” Somehow, he will have assimilated this ‘fact’ and will act accordingly.

Of course, I’m sure the White House press corps and our political pundits will be burning up the phone lines trying to determine exactly how a twenty percent reduction of NIH funding is supposed to work.